I used to own a creative soundcard a few years back in q4 days but eventually it stopped working for some reason (cant remember why). Initially I was very happy with it. Hopefully I'll be building a new pc in the coming months, and im interested in a sound card but know nothing about them honestly

Have you recently bought a sound card and do you think it is worth the money for music and games that can take advantage of it?

Also what brands/models are on top these days? I'd rather not just go to newegg and see what's most expensive..

i wouldn't consider using an amplifier and an additional equalizer as "normal use".

i think the difference these days and the difference you talk about just makes a proper amplifier while the soundchip has the smallest role.
as i said in some other thread i'm using the akg701 and a superlux662(unmodded) together with an m-audio audiophile 192 and a go-vibe v7.

i'm not much of a fan of equalizing, since i need the most neutral output and these headphones usually provide it.

no, I wasn't talking about external equipments, but the difference between the quality of the signal of an onboard chip, and the quality of the signal coming out from a dedicated soundcard with amp cababilites like the Xonar DX for example.

There are many awesome headphones out there in the sub 300 price range, but they all have some minor problems (like too much high, too much bass, or too sharp 8K, etc..), With a gentle EQ touch, you can finetune those headphones close to perfection, you don't need to alter the characteristic how they sound, just some very minor gentle corrections:)

I still believe , If you have a good headphone, the difference between an onboard chip and a dedicated sound-card is night and day.

Thanks for the idea about the Asus Xonar, I will just pick one up tomorrow. I'm not an audiophile, but it was getting really annoying, that with my new motherboard I can hear my mouse movements on my Sennheiser headphones (but at least not on my Logitech speakers).

Defaults to OS native language, and even if you trick it to English during installation, it won't stay like that after you restore the original region/lang settings, I know there must be a value in registry about this, but I didn't notice any change there: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Control.........etc........\0017\Settings

With GX enabled while playing quake, the latency is the same 60ish like with the latest official driver, and I need EQ not only for the music, but because I just can't quake without bass lowered.

The reason to use brainbits drivers are so you can use the low dpc version. You shouldnt have the audiocenter running at all while playing. If you turn it on after having booted it will increase dpc. If you need to change settings I suggest doing it in windows or if you do it in audiocenter, to close the app and reboot. Ofc you need to run msconfig to disable autostart.

yes I know you have three different driver modes to choose from during the installation, and I also know that one of them is the low latency DPC version, but as I said: I need EQ, so there is no difference for me, and that's why I prefer the official drivers:)

edit.: I only got my Xonar this year. I only had Creative cards b4 that (and some Turtle Beach and Gravis a long time ago xD). I know there were a lot of problems with the Xonar drivers in the past, and they are still far perfect (coders who released such a horrible drivers will never make it good anyway), but I never had a single problem with them since installation, while I had many with the unified ones.

I had forgotten these too... Sadly they do not fix the only issue I have (and they do not improve DPC latency either, it was already at 4΅s to start with in my case, probably because I never let the Control Center etc run in the background or start with Windows) which is "pops" when I open a folder using WASAPI output (so it's a bug with the Windows sounds, even though they've always been turned off).

Could be the motherboard indeed, I spent a week with this kind of problem, but it was my keyboard. Every time I pressed a key, there were a very short high pitched noise attached to it, you can imagine what's that mean with quake for example:(

1. Xonar DG is awesome.
2. I found the source of the noise (which is still present with the Xonar): It's the Abyssus. If I flick the switch to 125 Hz mode, the noise is gone. Back to 1000 Hz, the noise is back again.
This will be very interesting to fix...

Yea, the amped soundcards are quite a nice upgrade compared to onboard sounds;)

FSP-500W: Was a good choice, if it's not 5-6 years old, should be "clean".ASRock H67DE3: Well I'm not a rancorous-hater type of person, so I always try to forget bad things, but I'm just not ready yet to forgive them how they got rich by (literally) selling shit to the world for years. Everybody says that they make good motherboards nowadays, but tbh, I know nothing about the things they produce:(

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- make sure your are plugged your computer into a grounded electric socket (right shape (deep) is not enough! make sure there is a ground)
- make sure you don't have anything else on the same usb-lane with the mouse, also try every usb sockets, especially the usb3 ones.
- you can also "play" with these kind of things in your PC case if you have any at home.

I stuck with the knowledge, that it is the mouse and the USB. I tried the USB3 ports too, but I got the same result with the Abyssus (1000 Hz) and the DA (500 Hz by default). I will install the drivers to check if the noise is still present with 250 Hz. For further testing I have to manually set the frequency (WMO), in which my laziness is not helpful. :-)

The fact, that at 125 Hz there is no problem, basically eliminates every part except the port and the mouse in my opinion, so I will end up with a war cry of "DIEE [either RAZER or ASRock] DIEEE!" :-)

Not ALL of them. On laptops yes very often, on desktop PCs it's fairly rare to see this.

A lot of the problems people have with sound come from bad setups, and that includes one very common issue: bad PSUs and the lack of an UPS (yes, an UPS doesn't just protect against power failures, it's much more than that).

not really, to make cheap shit to sound decent you need to totally equalize them from your sound options, since their harmonic response is usually biased by only focusing sounds in middle frequencies.. That obviously aint a bit about soundcard.

Nowadays every >100 USD/EUR Mainboard has build in 5.1 Sound that is based on Realtek, as juM8o allready said, if you aren't using some extremely high-end headset/soundsystem you won't notice any difference between onboard and a external soundcard.

I would not recommend the DG. Just for a slightly more, you can get the DS, which has a replaceable amp, 192Khz sampling (vs the 96Khz only on the DG), true 7.1 analogue surround sound, and a dedicated S/PDIF port.

If you have a little more money, and want something future-proof, the XONAR-DX is an awesome PCI-E sound card with true dolby headphone support.

The DG also has dolby headphones, which some people like, while the DS doesn't.

96 or 192khz sampling rate is useless for 99.99% of the people. Audio CD is 44.1khz and films are 48khz. Games use both, but never more than that. Upsampling or downsampling will not improve the quality, in fact it will use more CPU (negligible on recent PCs) and increase the DPC latency greatly while affecting the sound quality (although I don't think many people can hear the difference).

The only times where you'll need 96khz+ is with some super high quality recordings (DVD audio, SACD etc) that no one can blind test compared to 44.1khz ones (the differences heard are because of the different mastering compared to the standard CDs, not the sampling or bit rate).
I've heard of a couple of Blu Ray with 96khz audio too, never seen one though.

True about the DG headphone thingy, but that's for music only imo, they sound pretty bad in games tbh, the dolby headphone feature in the DX is really usefull in games as well.

It's not that kind of sampling rate we are talking about here. When you are gaming (especially with equalizer and 3d effects)
I try to explain: Pick some 8bit/channel (24bit) images with lot of smooth gradients, add some effect and mixing them with each other in photoshop (like multiply, color burn, etc), and flatten the image to a single output.
Now do the same while you switch photosop into 16bit/channel mode and flatten the image like that before saving it into a 8bit/channel final image.
Compare the two images and you will understand while higher sampling is important:)

Games usually includes sound files sampled at 22-44Khz for the effects. If you start blending and HW-processing these things together (with eax for example) and add effects like reverb and other stuffz in the chip, the difference will come out, and you can hear it even with a mid-range headphone.

Imo it does, because games in 5.1 or 7.1 mode use more channels than only one, and the 96Khz vs 192Khz sampling rate is for all the channels added up together, so we are talking about downsampling here or am I wrong?

I'm no expert either, but i doubt that mixing 2 lets say 48khz samples makes it a 96khz :P

it (should) just determinates in which resolution the shit was recorded at. making this upsampling drama, like karlson said, a hoax, cause there are no additional informations to actually boost the quality.

What? no, the sampling rate is exactly what I said it was, and increasing or decreasing it does no good.

It's like a 128kbps MP3, converting it to 320kbps will not increase its quality since we are merely adding information that isn't there in the first place.

I believe you're confusing the sampling rate with the bit depth (16bit, 24bit or 32bit).
Yes, increasing the bit depth of your output has benefits for audio processing (best example is the volume control) even when the file is only 16bit. But most onboard chips do 24bit just fine so that's not a good excuse to get a soundcard.

From wiki : "The standard audio CD is said to have a data rate of 44.1 kHz/16, meaning that the audio data was sampled 44,100 times per second, with a bit depth of 16. CD tracks are usually stereo, using a left and right track, so the amount of audio data per second is double that of mono, where only a single track is used. The bit rate is then 44100 samples/second x 16 bits/sample x 2 = 1,411,200 bit/s or 1.4 Mbit/s."

Yeah, but again you need to have 96/24 recordings for this to actually matter.
I can believe there is a difference in SQ between a 48khz blu ray and a 96khz one because of the complexity of movie soundtracks. But apparently none of the films I like have it so don't ask me to verify this :)

Also, the difference people hear between SACD and normal CDs (for example) is 99% of the time a matter of re-mastering and better recording. In other words it's really hard to know what truly causes the difference.

But for stereo recordings (I do have a few 96/24 ones for the sake of it) it's gonna be real hard to tell the difference (if it's humanly possible at all).

I dont play quakelive :P
I play all other games :o
Sound was shit on every setting I used including everything I would say.
BTW my musics are like blue ray quality :P they sound way better on 7.1 virtual SS card than shitty realtake cards. :)

A good built in sound card is the Realtek ALC889, I don't know about the others. But if you get a mobo with that one built in it shouldn't disappoint (I use it myself, sounds just as good if not better than my old creative card).

At the moment Xonar by asus is considered to be on top of rest.(creative etc.[but not the ultra hifi])
In my experience int soundcards are rubbish on two reasons:
1. sound quality is really poor and gets terrible when in high volume.
2. they even fail to drive normal headphones at volumes.

Yes Creative is known for its horrible drivers. And since EAX and hardware acceleration are gone, no point in getting a Creative card over an Asus one (drivers are decent with them, don't even need to have any extra service or process running in XP for example).

So - after arguing all over the thread :D - I recommend you buy a good headphone like the (Audio Technica ATH-AD700) and an ASUS Xonar soundcard with a built in amp like the DG (or something more expensive model which has a built in amplifier, but that's a must or you wont notice much difference compared to the chips they put onboard nowadays)

yea, if someone has a headphone already, the Xonar DG is a no-brainer for $25(!) only, it's a shame it's only PCI.
The Xense is an awesome headset bundle, but while the PC350 is superb for FPS gaming, is not the best for music imo.
I dunno which is the next cheapest amped Xonar with dolby headphone support, the ST?

Creative == bad drivers and worse sound quality. You don't really need EAX nowadays, since there are not many games use that exclusively.
Under dx10+ HW accelerated directsound and DirectSound3D is not supported anyway, APIs like OpenAL are much better and they support HW accel under vista/win7 as well.

What you need is a good software audio engine built into the 3D core of the game and a Xonar with Dolby surround headphone mode:)

I'm sure there are much better alternatives since its not intended for gaming but I can recommend Nuforce uDAC & AIAIAI TMA-1 // Harman Kardon amp & B&W 603 speakers. Remember investing in expensive desktop speakers is not a wise choice, you're better of buying decent headphones or get the real deal.

Yeah he is right, I've got the Audigy 2 ZS and while I appreciate the big difference between onboard and separate audio, the drives are a nightmare. Even if you try some modified drivers like Daniel_K (basically he unlocked features not fix things...I believe). My next step would be definitely stand alone DAC whether it's S/PDIF or HDMI. No more annoying drivers, no more restrictions by the sound card, just raw audio data that will be converted based on the quality of DAC.

Creative are still on top for Gaming sound-cards with their X-FI-thing.
If you want a good sound card for music : Asus Xonar Essence ST (PCI) / STX (PCI-E), just bought mine few days ago and it's very good with my AH-D7000. This card performs good with game but the creative are better for that.

Nah, I'm not expert at all, it's just part of systembuilding (what i love), so I read a lot about components :)

With the DX, I'm not really sure you can hear much difference between the 595 and a 555 (+595 mod), you need better amp for that. If you are really into Sennheiser, you could also save money and buy a 555/558 and mod it to 595/598, but maybe I'm wrong, after all the DX is a very good card:)

If it would be up to me and I would need to pick a Sennheiser, I would definitely go for a used HD600 (you can get one as low as 110-120, and people who buy high-end audiophile headphones are usually save it in very good shape). The difference between the HD5x and the HD6x series are night and day, but ofc, the 595 is also a very good headphone:)

Dont mean to OT, but creative cards are worth it for CS1.6 ?
I mean, I dont really care about the EAX and I hear that it wont works great for CS1.6, but I even looked for the Aureal 3D cards beacause of the A3D 2.0 technology which seems to be better when sound cards now-days..
I also found win7 patch for it but I cant trust it, and I also heard about that steam dont support A3D so I dont really know what to belive at.

Now I'm stuck with the steelseries 7h's usb beacause my onboard die, and pair of ATH-AD700 and steelseries 7H.

I thought about creative mainly beacause the DSP/chip they using - CA20K1 and 2, which seems for mainly games, while creative use 8788 or 86 (DG stripped chip to cut the price?).

My main issue is that I'm lack of PCI-E, I found it only a month ago, when I was almost got the Titanium HD.
In my country I cant found the Xtermegamer or the music, but there is alot XtermeAudio (rebarnded audigy?)

I dont really know that to do, anyone may suggest?
Basically, I just want to get the best 3D pos audio from the games I'm playing at (mainly CS1.6, some COD and gonna play both BF3, COD7 and rage).

Hardware accelerated 3D sound is simply awesome, the problem is that we don't get it much nowadays:( For example, Bf3 also won't have any kind of HW accelerated audio, all will be done in the CPU.

I would go for a decent card with dolby-headphone mode. For FPS games, what you really need is decent noise cancellation and as much soundstage as possible.
If you have an audiophile headphone, you will get very good positional audio with Dolby surround sound "only".

ps: It' sad that the audio in Quakelive is so horrible, it doesn't really matter what we have:(

Well, since the Xonar DG have power full amp (even not that needed since my ad700 have low imp.), great chip sound and all great three dolbies techonlogies (serround, headphones and logic II) so I gusses it should be best for gaming since the only diffrents than the higher ends Xonars is the cleaity? :)

While the dolby headphone mode with the built in amp is truly awesome, I'm not sure about the surround in the DG tbh, that's the part where it's really suffers compared to the more expensive models, the 7.1 virtual thingy sounds great indeed, but you get some lag with that because it's only virtual and needs processing.
It's great for movies and music, and they are also very good for singleplayer gaming, but you don't really want to turn that on in multiplayer imo, it will just mess up everything if the game doesn't have surround sound support.
If you are a seriously need EAX for high level multiplayer gaming, go for a Creative card imo.

apart from all of this, the DG is hell of a good card and it costs almost nothing, I think it's highly worth every penny:)

AD700's soundstage is huge, if it's about FPS gaming, you can't go wrong with that headphone indeed:)

A3d was considered as a cheat in 1.6 back then ;): As far as I know it only worked with some aurelius soundcards and I doubt you'll get one of them. To be honest you don't need a specific soundcard for 1.6. Any onboard chip will suffice for your purpose.
You should consider that bass is bad for 1.6 because it gets harder to locate the opponent.

Yeah, I've always heard about these cheater sounding card but didn't have chance to test it :D

My headphones have low to not notceable bass and pretty high soundstage, any feature that design for make the soundstage higher will really helps me?
I mean..my headset have high soundstage already, turn on feature like this will not mess the pos 3d audio up?

Btw, I just tried to turn on the EAX on CS1.6 with my 7H'usb soundcard and it seems to work, the sound is much more crisp than default and there is good in the direction when the sounds coming from, I gusses I'll recommended that.

but the Xonar DG have also EAX emolution and Dolby headphone, and better chip and amp, so it should be night and day diffrents, doesnt it?

- onboard is enough, but amped addon-cards are much better especially with audiophile headphones
- sadly hardware acceleration is not used anymore in games
- eax is great but nothing uses it anymore, surround is the way now

With surround, I meant Dolby headphone mode ofc.
But "true" surround headphones == fail indeed, because they use more (mostly 3) smaller speakers on each side which degrades sound quality so much, it's not worth it imo.

for the true positioning "effect" you gonna need hardware support, but with Dolby Pro Logic II, you can even upconvert a simple stereo audio to surround, and that's also gives a very nice result.

edit: I think mixed these things up, I'm not sure if you can "reroute" that Prologic upconverted audio into the dolby headphone mode:), but anyway, I like the plain stereo the best for positional audio, so I have very little experience. Gonna read some about this and get back to you:)

It does not require any kind of dolby algorithm on the application level, all you have to do is to set the game to 5.1 or 7.1 audio, and the hardware will do the rest. For mp3 and other stereo files, Dolby Pro Logic II can upconvert your singal to 5.1/7.1, and it can be also enjoyed with Dolby Headphone technology.

But there is a side effect. For the wider / more realistic soundstage, you gonna lose some positional ability with sounds far away from you, ergo it's not recommended with competitive multiplayer fps games, but it makes SP games and movies sound much better.

edit: I had a 5.1 headset once for a few days (was called Medusa-NX or something iirc), and I can tell you that the 3D positional audio is much much better with Dolby Headphone in every way:)

ah, you have to put it to 5.1 / 7.1 ingame, k.
But i doubt that it will be better for positional audio for example in "Crysis", when u set it to 5.1 instead of letting the game itself make the positional audio over headphones.
BTW i think crysis has the best sound so far.

I had the first medusa back then, it was a joke how bad it was.
The positional audio was so awful, i think nothing is worse.

Yea, the Medusa was simply horrible. I had it from overclockers.co.uk, my worst purchase ever for sure. I received it on Friday and it was going right back on Monday;)

As I said it's not really good for tracking positions, but it adds a great deal of soundstage to the audio. I fine-tuned the locations of my virtual speakers in the Dolby setup specially for my headphone, and also made the (7.1) "effect" as low as possible (move some of them closer and used smaller virtual room), so it's just a gentle touch to the original audio of the game.
I play every SP games with Dolby Headphone 7.1 now, can't imagine I could ever go back to stereo for single player.

My gamer PC died so I can't test Crysis now, but you made me curious and if I can afford a new mainboard I will give it a try :)

Liking Dolby Headphones and co or not is personal preference (I don't) but true surround with headphones does exist, as mentionned above (binaural recording) that's probably even better than surround with 5.1/7.1 speakers but sadly it's extremely rare and never used for games.

You can't really use realtime binaural audio in games, because the location and the orientation of the ears are fixed/constrained to the recording of the sound(s) (you could use it in pre-rendered cutscenes ofc).
Basically if you truly render 3d sounds (reflections, dopler, etc) like you do with high-end graphics, you can get the same quality, but that's something what would require a dozen of X-Fi chips imo (talking about binaural quality here).

Aureal were in court with Creative. Creative alleged they stole their IP. Aureal came up innocent, but the case made them bankrupt. Creative bought them out after that.... ( wonder why didn't Creative had to pay for all the costs:/ )

they are just very talented people, so when the predators eat up their company, they employ them:)

Think about the creator of the awesome tseng vido cards, who invented things like: "extended register sets, packed pixel 8, 15, 16, and 24-bit color modes, the first local bus graphics designs, the first integrated local bus controller, and Image Memory Access (IMA)- a high-speed asynchronous input for video or graphics into the display buffer."
Tseng Labs engineers and graphics expertise being purchased by ATI (now a part of AMD) in December 1997, but the same happened with ArtX who created the graphics chip for Nintendo in the N64...etc etc..

A3D was awesome because the people behing it were brilliant minds, and it wasn't successful because - like with most of the things on this planet- the people who decides where we are going and what we should like/think are the biggest evil faggots in the universe:)
200 years from now, if there will be any record about 3Dsounds in the history books of games, there will bwe only one line something like this:

" ....... companies like Creative were pioneers..... " and noone will give a fuck about the truth:)

i wish QL had that kind of positional audio.
That was always bugging me alot that Q3 / QL didn't have the soundengine it deserves, instead you need to play many hours until you understand each situation you heard ingame.

Q3 had a3d and I loved it tbh, it made the effects sound so unnatural, but you knew exactly where they were coming from. Now we have sound processors like the X-fi with more than 50 million transistors, and we use them for nothing:(